Can't
get your students motivated enough to study? Not a problem in South Korea
- in fact, they have the opposite problem: their students study too much.

How much? Let's say that the problem is so bad that the government started
raiding study halls to stop students from studying. No, seriously.

Amanda Ripley wrote this must-read article for TIME Magazine:

In South Korea, it has come to this. To reduce the country's addiction
to private, after-hours tutoring academies (called hagwons), the authorities
have begun enforcing a curfew — even paying citizens bounties
to turn in violators.

The raid starts in a leisurely way. We have tea, and I am offered
a rice cracker. Cha Byoung-chul, a midlevel bureaucrat at Seoul's Gangnam
district office of education, is the leader of this patrol. I ask him
about his recent busts, and he tells me about the night he found 10
teenage boys and girls on a cram-school roof at about 11 p.m. "There
was no place to hide," Cha recalls. In the darkness, he tried to
reassure the students. "I told them, 'It's the hagwon that's in
violation, not you. You can go home.'"

Cha smokes a cigarette in the parking lot. Like any man trying
to undo centuries of tradition, he is in no hurry. "We don't leave
at 10 p.m. sharp," he explains. "We want to give them 20 minutes
or so. That way, there are no excuses." Finally, we pile into a
silver Kia Sorento and head into Daechi-dong, one of Seoul's busiest
hagwon districts. The streets are thronged with parents picking up their
children. The inspectors walk down the sidewalk, staring up at the floors
where hagwons are located — above the Dunkin' Donuts and the Kraze
Burgers — looking for telltale slivers of light behind drawn shades.

At about 11 p.m., they turn down a small side street, following
a tip-off. They enter a shabby building and climb the stairs, stepping
over an empty chip bag. On the second floor, the unit's female member
knocks on the door. "Hello? Hello!" she calls loudly. A muted
voice calls back from within, "Just a minute!" The inspectors
glance at one another. "Just a minute" is not the right answer.
Cha sends one of his colleagues downstairs to block the elevator. The
raid begins.

Parents think that by sending their children to expensive Academies until the wee hours of the mornings they are 'helping' them by making them more competitive.Instead the children are exhausted and suicidal. This leads to them not being able to pay attention during class at their actual school, forcing them to go to the academies to catch up. And the cycle continues.

I had a student kill himself last year over his math grade. He was in 4th grade.